I'm certainly not the only one who read that and thought "y'know, it'd be nice to set that up in the first world". If you can provide 22 Mbps connections to a large area wirelessly, you have a business model, right? Plus, it requires laying/leasing almost no cable.
You have a pretty marginal business model, because each customer gets less than 1 Mbps and thus is not willing to pay very much. And as cheap as the towers are, they're still expensive enough to eat up your revenue.
>because each customer gets less than 1 Mbps
I don't follow? Each tower can presumably broadcast multiple access points.
Press releases always quote the total sector bandwidth, and at long range there tend to be a lot of customers per sector. Due to the narrow channels and good propagation, 700 MHz white spaces may end up being worse than 2.4 GHz.